A question! A veritable question! From someone I don't know! Or at least, from someone I haven't known for that long! At least, not for longer than ten years! Or so.
Your friend has published a novel. It is, of course, terrible. In fact, it's worse than terrible: reading more than one sentence actually makes you nauseous. And now your friend is asking if you've "had a chance to read it yet". What should a good Catastrophyte do?
1) Feel violently jealous and allow yourself to be seized by a devastating sense of personal failure. The book may be execrable, but it is also now published and it is well known that many consumers lack the gag reflex.
2) Good catastrophytes desperately fear conflict of any kind because it will undoubtedly bring about the end of a friendship or, possibly, yelling. So the first response to this situation should be: stalling. You've been busy at work. You've been sick. You've been sick at work. You've really been feeling down. Pull them all out. If your friend persists, and some strong souls will, proceed to 3).
3) Clearly you cannot tell the truth. That would be both foolhardy and brave. And totally unnecessary. If you told the truth, your friendship would obviously either be finished or irrevocably damaged. If you've been passive-aggressively attempting to extricate yourself from this friendship for years, by all means, be honest. But if there's still something to be gained for you from this relationship, there's only one thing you can do: lie.
4) Lie. I cannot say this enough. LIE. Don't compromise your principles entirely; just lie a little bit. Let's try it. I loved your chapter transitions. The font choice was very believable. I always thought you'd be capable of writing such a book. Or, simply gaze at them, clasp your hands together earnestly and make low, keening noises. That can be interpreted in any number of ways.
5) This is yet another truly delicious catastrophizing scenario because it gives rise to a larger question. Why are you friends with someone who writes nauseating prose? How's your prose?
6) What's so beautiful about this is that it will have a lasting impact on you. If you are really convincing when you lie ever so slightly to your friend, you will learn never to believe any compliments paid to you ever again.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
Question: what's a couch between friends? Answer: them's fighting words. Also, I'm not Amy. Dear Amy: A furniture dispute is turning an old friendship upside-down.During a frenzied 500-mile move for a job, I agreed to lend a sofa to a friend and her roommates.I was moving to temporary housing, and they worked for a political campaign making very little pay. The couch would allow them extra sleeping space for campaign workers stopping through, and would save me some storage costs. I expected them to take good care of it.Now that I am moving into a permanent apartment with space for the sofa, I discovered that the household cat has destroyed the couch.Quotes to repair the sofa came back well above the total cost I paid for it new, so the only option is to replace the couch. This specific couch was purchased as part of a set.I requested that the roommate pay me full price to replace the couch, but she is objecting, saying that she could buy a couch for half the cost on Craigslist. She is only willing to pay for half of the value of the sofa. She doesn't seem to understand that it is part of a set and was in, at worst, "like new" condition.I don't see how I should have to pay for her irresponsible pet ownership when I was doing them a favor to begin with!I don't want to ruin my relationship with my friend over a petty matter. Or am I being petty?Can't I get my couch replaced? 1) Your primary concern should be that you just wrote a novella about a dispute over a couch. Now, I am no fan of brevity, but a good catastrophizer should always attempt to anticipate the negative judgements of those around him or her, and those around you think you used too many words on a couch.
2) Your first mistake: lending anyone anything. This is always foolhardy. If a cat doesn't regularly attack it, someone will vomit on it (probably an overstimulated political staffer); if someone does not vomit on it, someone will probably urinate on it (probably an overstimulated political staffer). Trust nobody. Also, never, ever borrow anything. You never know when you might vomit, urinate, or acquire a cat.
3) Always make sure that the compensating you do for your insecurities is subtle. On the one hand, you are obviously smug about the fact that you purchased a furniture set and that you were in a position to lend this to your furniture-impoverished friend. On the other hand, you make it clear that the only reason she is furniture-poor is that she is donating her time to a cause. You're proud you have a job and that you have friends in the fast-paced world of campaign work. You feel superior because your friend was forced to turn to you for a couch. But you're obviously wracked with anxieties because your friend has a more exciting life than you do and all you have to show for your life is a furniture set. Or am I reading too much into this? I tend to do that when I'm feeling inadequate. I have, you see, no matching furniture set.
4. Your friend is a bitch. She should obviously pay for a new couch. This raises a major concern: why was she your friend in the first place? Because her failing really reveals a bigger failure in you.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
The New York Times's Social Q's missed the boat on this answer, so I will catch the boat and then pilot it. Badly. The Enemy Next Door
A longtime neighbor responds to my greetings with stony silence. I suspect this has something to do with a noise dispute I had with an upstairs neighbor who was then her employer. But that was a decade ago! Now, she avoids taking the elevator if I'm on it. Should I confront her and clear the air?
H.S. Answering letters of this kind is really one of the most irresponsible things one can do, as one is provided with so little context. One, however, will proceed.
1) What are those greetings that are greeted in return with a stony silence? Do you say, "A pleasant morning to you," or do you, say, drop your pants and say, "What would have happened if the Nazis had won the war?"
2) In terms of the noise dispute - who was responsible for the noise ten years ago? Was it you? Is it possible you're still creating a stupefying amount of noise and she's too shy to reprimand you? At what level do you play Poison's Unskinny Bop repeatedly?
3) I find your dilemma to be delicious in a catastrophic sense because there is more than one right answer. Whatever you decide, you will most likely spread interpersonal poison. If you do not confront her, you will stew and brood and your elevator rides will be exercises in quiet resentment and tension. If you do confront her, there's a good chance that you will manage to alienate and upset her and that your elevator rides will become exercises in quiet resentment and tension. If she manages to avoid riding the elevator with you, try to dawdle near her front door or parking space so that you can cultivate that quiet resentment and tension. At least then, you'll know the feelings are mutual. Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
I have received my second reader question! From someone who is not in the least related to me! Read on:
Let's say you're the parent of a very successful catastrophizer--should you feel pride, because so much of you lives on in a new generation? Or sadness and regret because your offspring has arguably been infected by your own congenital and over-arching pessimism?
- Anonynomous Individual Not
Responsible for Fathering the
Catastrophizer
Before going any further with this answer, I should make one thing very clear: you should always feel sadness and regret. Very occasionally, you may allow yourself to feel pride, or joy, or elation, but only because those sensations will add a certain piquancy to your subsequent feelings of sadness and regret. Don't be concerned about having to force the return of the sadness and regret; they will come back without much prodding because life is full of things that cause them.
Feeling pride that part of you lives on in the next generation can quite easily be made to result in profound depression (although all things, obviously, can be made to result in profound depression). First of all, that pride is necessarily bound up in the fact that you yourself will die, a fact which is likely to be interpreted as a downer. The individual in whom your qualities (fine ones, I will admit) will live on will also die, possibly without issue. Even if that individual were to produce offspring, those offspring would eventually die, and so on. Even if you belonged to a family that regularly produced progeny, all of whom inherited your qualities, remember that the world itself will most likely shrivel up and disappear at some point in the vast expanse of future time. Your pride will, one way or another, be short-lived.
You should absolutely believe that it is because of your style of parenting/doomed genetic bequest that your child has developed catastrophizing tendencies, because as you've indicated, that line of thought will undoubtedly produce more sadness and regret. However, if you were lucky/unfortunate enough to produce an even vaguely observant child, that child, one way or another, would have grown up catastrophically. The beige and brown Ford Fairmont had nothing to do with it.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
The question I will be considering today is the following:
Are there telltale signs a man isn't happy in his marriage?
I am including a link to the original answer from the New York Post, not because I think you should read the original answer, but because the link itself is instructive:
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/spitzer_babe_answers
If you were unfamiliar with the name "Ashley Dupre", never fear: the New York Post refers to her here only as "Eliot Spitzer Babe." That's right: readers of this paper can get love advice from none other than the call-girl who brought down the once untouchable governor of New York.
Unfortunately, she has not updated her advice column since mid-December. I choose simply to believe she has been deliberating ponderously over her next pieces of advice.
But on to the telltale signs. Yes, there are many telltale signs of unhappiness in a relationship or marriage.
1) Detachment. He may sidestep questions, avoid glances, fake sleep to get out of conversations.
2) Forced intimacy. He may enfold you in embraces constantly to prove to himself he still loves you.
3) A strange seesawing between detachment and forced intimacy. Not knowing yet whether he will force himself to stay and rekindle the feeble flame of love or allow himself to leave and have some sex with people, he behaves erratically, one minute clutching at you, the next, talking about having some sex with people.
4) Anything else. You see, catastrophytes, anyone you're involved with can already, right now, this very second, be planning to leave you. Anything can really be a sign of this intention, if you're looking for it. Or you're just paranoid, in which case, that's the tendency in you that will ultimately make him leave you.
4) He's having sex with Ashley Dupre.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
If the apocalypse predicted for December 2012 is correct and he has not, for some reason, succumbed to other, more personal ultimate catastrophes, what's a boy to do? Could you please Go Survivalist?
If, against all odds, the self-proclaimed experts are right and, against all odds, humans of the earth have not all expired mysteriously of natural causes by that point, this self-proclaimed expert recommends that...well, you see, it all depends.
My answer to the question from "what's a boy to do" was predicated on the idea that the earth would be destroyed completely. Decimated. Annihilated. But you're right, right-thinking critic, the previews for That Film suggest various cataclysms, not total ruination. Of course, if the latter had been represented, it would have been a very different film. Possibly a better film.
But the problem with cataclysms, you see, is that they're so very unpredictable. Floods might hit one area; earthquakes might afflict an entirely different area. Lightning might knock out one power grid, leaving another completely untouched. I just discovered (damn you, Nova Science Now!) that there are mysterious tremors under the American midwest that presage a coming earthquake disaster. I've been avoiding California for years, and now I realize that unintentionally avoiding the midwest for years has also been prudent.
I haven't even begun to address the issues that will be raised by the roving bands of human criminals. They exist now; they will certainly exist in the world after Event Two (Event One being the Big Bang. I'm trying to lay the groundwork here for my own post-apocalyptic mythology so that eventually I can write and sell a film script). People will smash windows and steal food; people will kill one another over canned beans and the right to repopulate the world by breeding with Nicholas Cage.
Should you stockpile weapons that will most certainly be repossessed by The New Authority (film script again) and used to kill you? Should you retreat to a bunker that will be shaken and shattered by earthquakes? Should you retreat to a midwestern cabin and then discover you should have watched Nova Science Now?
Absolutely. Do any or all of those things. Amass canned and dry goods. Learn how to hunt local vermin and cure their meat. Keep band aids around. That kind of paranoid preparation is the hallmark of a good catastrophizer. However, every good catastrophizer should also know and be haunted by the fact that whatever preparations are made, they will be undoubtedly prove to be either disastrously inadequate or disastrously futile.
Happy New Year!
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
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